again trump and the vote commission do not care the Russians did gain access to our vote systems nationwide. It is like right wingers are giving them the medal of love for this activity. again Sessions justice department reversed an Obama justice department fine on Russia that the Obama justice department won in court for 200 million plus dollars. When Sessions/trump took office they removed this fine that the russian KGB attorney that met with Donny jr (that Donny lied and dad lied they never met with a russian) was representing that russian client.

So for the russian hacking, they have been paid at least 200 million so far. and no investigation by the vote fraud commision into russia when they got into many systems. That is just fine with right-wingers.

Russia's military intelligence agency launched an attack days before Election Day on a U.S. company that provides election services and systems, including voter registration, according to a top-secret report posted Monday by The Intercept.

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The news site published a report, with redactions, by the National Security Agency that described the Russian spear-phishing scheme, one it described as perpetrated by the same intelligence agency — the GRU — that the Obama administration imposed sanctions on for the 2016 cyber mischief.

According to the NSA report, Russian hackers sent emails to people who worked at a company that provides state and local election offices with voter registration systems, trying to trick them into giving up their user credentials. The Intercept reports, "At least one of the employee accounts was likely compromised, the agency concluded." The NSA report says that the Russians then used information from that account to launch a separate phishing attack targeting 122 local election officials.

The hackers apparently sent the officials emails that appeared to be from the vendor in an effort to trick the recipients to click on an attachment or link that could have introduced malware into their computers. If they had been successful, the hackers could have gained control of the infected computer. The American spy agency acknowledges it doesn't know how successful the Russian efforts were in that effort or what information or access the GRU may have gotten.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

VR Systems, the Florida-based election systems provider referenced in the material, said in a statement:

"When a customer alerted us to an obviously fraudulent email purporting to come from VR Systems, we immediately notified all our customers and advised them not to click on the attachment. We are only aware of a handful of our customers who actually received the fraudulent email and of those, we have no indication that any of them clicked on the attachment or were compromised as a result.
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"Phishing and spear-phishing are not uncommon in our society. We regularly participate in cyber alliances with state officials and members of the law enforcement community in an effort to address these types of threats. We have policies and procedures in effect to protect our customers and our company.
"It is also important to note that none of our products perform the function of ballot marking, or tabulation of marked ballots."
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Separately on Monday, the Justice Department announced that it is charging a 25-year-old Georgia woman who works for an intelligence agency contractor with sending classified material to a news organization.

Reality Leigh Winner of Augusta was arrested Saturday. The FBI said in court documents that she had been accused of printing out classified material and sending it by mail to a news outlet.

Two national security officials with knowledge of the matter confirmed to NPR on Monday that the cases are connected.

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Winner's arrest follows the promise of a crackdown by the Trump administration on leaks, which have detailed a number of sometimes embarrassing details about the inner workings of the government and some of its national security arrangements.

"Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation's security and undermines public faith in government," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a statement on Monday. "People who are trusted with classified information and pledge to protect it must be held accountable when they violate that obligation."

The NSA document posted on Monday offers some of the most official details yet about Russia's cyberactivity, which the U.S. intelligence community has previously discussed in much broader terms. It also confirmed that the Russian attacks continued after the Department of Homeland Security publicly attributed the meddling to Russia's intelligence agencies, confirming that those statements did not deter more cyberattacks, and after President Barack Obama's warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin in September "to cut it out, there were going to be serious consequences if he did not."

Intelligence agency leaders say that Russia's attacks did not change any actual votes in the 2016 race, but election technology experts have been concerned for years that hackers could attempt to manipulate not only individual voting machines but also other equipment used to run elections, such as those that tabulate votes or keep track of voter registrations.

While the machines that voters use to cast their ballots are not connected to the Internet, the computers used to program these machines, or to run elections, can be connected at some point, leaving them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

J. Alex Halderman, a computer security expert from the University of Michigan, is among those who have been sounding the alarm for years.

"It's highly significant that these attacks took place, because it confirms that Russia was interested in targeting voting technology, at least to some extent. I hope further investigation can shed more light on what they intended to do and how far they got," he says.

Halderman and others note that local election officials often contract with private vendors, such as VR Systems, to program their voting equipment. He says if those vendors are hacked, then malware could easily be spread to local election offices and ultimately to individual voting machines.

Jeremy Epstein, another voting security expert, said that even though the NSA report describes efforts to hack into voter registration systems, once hackers have access to a local election office's computers, they can potentially infect other aspects of the election.
"If I was a Russian trying to manipulate an election, this is exactly how I would do it," he says.

Experts say it would be difficult to know whether votes had been tampered with unless the equipment had a paper ballot backup. Those paper ballots can be used to verify whether the election results reported electronically were correct.

Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law notes that seven of the eight states that use VR Systems services — California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina and West Virginia — have paper-based systems. And most of the equipment used in the eighth state — Virginia — also use paper.

Another concern is that even if hackers did not try to change the actual election results, they could undermine confidence in the voting system by causing enough confusion at the polls to raise doubts about the results. That could happen, for example, if voters showed up at the polls to find that their names were not listed or listed incorrectly.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

It increasingly looks like Russian hackers may have affected actual vote totals.

Quote:

he last outpost of moderate opinion on the subject of the Russian ratfcking during the 2016 presidential election seems to be that, yes, there was mischief done and steps should be taken both to reveal its extent and to prevent it from happening again in the future, but that the ratfcking, thank baby Jesus, did not materially affect the vote totals anywhere in the country. This is a calm, measured, evidence-based judgment. It is also a kind of prayer. If the Russian cyber-assault managed to change the vote totals anywhere, then the 2016 presidential election is wholly illegitimate. That rocks too many comfort zones in too many places.

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(Bear in mind, for the moment, that we are discussing Russian ratfcking, and not the myriad problems with how we ourselves manage our elections. That's for another time, except in the context of how those inherent problems facilitated the Russian chicanery.)

It may well be that the Russians didn't affect the actual numbers last November but, as Bloomberg points out, that was not for lack of trying.
In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said. The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step -- complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day "red phone." In October, two of the people said, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia's role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict.

One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn't try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America's disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.

This may be so, but it's becoming increasingly harder to believe that, in one of those 7,000 local jurisdictions, the Russians didn't strike gold. American democracy went out on the roof last fall.

Apparently, the Obama administration first caught wind of the attack when the Illinois system was seriously compromised.

Illinois became Patient Zero in the government's probe, eventually leading investigators to a hacking pandemic that touched four out of every five U.S. states. Using evidence from the Illinois computer banks, federal agents were able to develop digital "signatures" -- among them, Internet Protocol addresses used by the attackers -- to spot the hackers at work. The signatures were then sent through Homeland Security alerts and other means to every state. Thirty-seven states reported finding traces of the hackers in various systems, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. In two others -- Florida and California -- those traces were found in systems run by a private contractor managing critical election systems.

The Obama people went to condition red; the Department of Homeland Security tried to declare state election systems to be part of our critical national infrastructure, which they clearly are. The Republicans in Congress shot that down. Curiouser and curiouser, some states declined to cooperate fully with DHS. As the invaluable Marcy Wheeler pointed out on the electric Twitter machine Tuesday morning, one of the recalcitrant states was Georgia, where you can't audit the voting machines, and where they are having a crucial—and extremely expensive—special congressional election next Tuesday.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

A member of President Donald Trump’s commission on voter fraud sued in federal court on Thursday, alleging that the commission is violating federal law by excluding him and others from participating and refusing to provide documents available to other members.

The lawsuit, filed by Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap in Washington, D.C., claims violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It asks the court to compel the commission to hand over all documents he’s requested, share all future documents, to include him in all communications and to prevent the release of any final report until he has had a chance to review it.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

Republicanism: the art of selecting the worst possible person for every job.

The Trump administration is leaning toward naming Thomas Brunell, a Texas professor with no government experience, to the top operational job at the U.S. Census Bureau, according to two people who have been briefed on the bureau’s plans.
Brunell, a political science professor, has testified more than half a dozen times on behalf of Republican efforts to redraw congressional districts, and is the author of a 2008 book titled “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”
Because what America really needs is, of course, more elections in which one side or the other will always win, in all circumstances, even if one side decides to pick a criminal or a pedophile, and voters needn't bother even showing up.

The pick would break with the long-standing precedent of choosing a nonpolitical government official as deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau. The job has typically been held by a career civil servant with a background in statistics. It does not require Senate confirmation, so Congress would have no power to block the hire.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

trumps secret commission sued to release all information vs what they were selectively using for propaganda. So what do they do because the truth would be known.. he cloes the commision because he can not show any liberal vote fraud. It would only show right wing vote fraud... and they are being sued to release the information all of it... right winger can not handle the truth...

again not one single right winger in charge of voting in any state has ever been able to show and convict more than a handful of people per election for vote fraud that an id would stop... Not one has been willing to testify under oath they have any proof.

The Kansas ranch offered owner Que Fullmer a fresh start following a 1998 immigration raid at his Chino, California, ranch where authorities found workers in what a California labor official described as "economic slavery." The Kansas ranch also offered Fullmer a chance to rebuild after bankruptcies cost him the bulk of his operations in Muleshoe, Texas.

Fullmer pleaded guilty in 1999 in California federal court to a felony count of harboring and concealing immigrants in the country illegally. He was sentenced to six months of home detention, a $10,000 fine and ordered to perform 500 hours of community service, court records show.

In December, he was charged with illegally casting election ballots in both Colorado and Kansas in 2016. The registered Republican is accused of voting more than once and other violations. The case is pending in Kansas.

As a result of Fullmer's past immigration-related conviction, the lawyer for the company said in an email that it takes "extra care" not to hire workers who are in the country illegally.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

In Montana race, Green Party candidate was on GOP’s payroll
03/14/18 09:20 AM
By Steve Benen

Quote:

There are more than a few Senate Democrats running in red states this year, including Sen. Jon Tester (D) in Montana, whom Republicans are eager to beat.

How eager? The Associated Press ran an interesting report late yesterday.

A man who registered as a Green Party candidate for Montana’s U.S. Senate race was on the state Republican Party’s payroll and heads a newly formed anti-tax group, according to a review of election documents.

Timothy Adams filed as a challenger Monday against Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, who faces a tough re-election campaign, in a race where a Green Party candidate could siphon votes from the Democrat.

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